SOURCE: "Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs," in Holocaust Literature: A Handbook of Critical, Historical, and Literary Writings, edited by Saul S. Friedman, Greenwood Press, 1993, pp. 521-32.

[An American educator and critic, Kutler specializes in Hebrew studies. In the essay below, he discusses autobiographical writing on the Holocaust as a genre, nothing characteristics and themes.]

The assessing of autobiographical writing in the form of memoirs, records of oral interviews, and diaries for the period of the Holocaust is a little like sailing a boat in the fog. Without an eye on the lighthouse, one can easily be distracted and make errors in judgment causing disaster. A sailor's best rule of thumb is to have adequate maps to guide his or her approach toward a safe harbor.

The same situation confronts the historian of the Holocaust. Not enough time has elapsed for a corpus to have formed that can serve the...